Standing on the ruins of the USSR, the new Russian empire was in no hurry to say goodbye to its past, which, in addition to everything else, was devilishly resisting the new era. This gave rise to a transitional era, which Svitlana Aleksievich rightly called the second-hand period."Second-hand time" is the monologues of people who were "lucky" to live in the USSR and during its disintegration. From these revelations – from endearingly nostalgic to frighteningly boring – a mosaic portrait of the “Soviet man” is formed, who, despite the difficulties of life at that time – persecution by the authorities, ideological pressure, ascetic life – to a greater extent misses that time and quite rarely thinks about the price of that "greatness". These monologues are full of human suffering, physical and mental pain, painful longing for what has been lost, the desire to regret a difficult fate, disappointment in the present and romanticization of some unfulfilled past.Together with her characters, the writer shows that the period of Yeltsin democracy was a screen that deep social transformations did not take place. And the Soviet system demanded a continuation in another monster...